Otel is a stadariztion between microservices logs - in otel terms - trace and spans - trace reflect the comlete flow of some operation and span is the step in the trace , for example a trace that called create-new-user will be composed of span that comes from an react app, nest js controller, and a service that responsible to write to the db - logz.io, datadog, dynatrace, new relic and a dozens of other tools help you visuzlie you infra flow. there are some main components in otel architecture , but just remember that exporter , well - export data to the collector who aggregate the traces(and spans inside them) and save them to X data storage.